This was my first major composition. It started with me creating an almost obsessive habit of playing through psalm books and hymnals that I was collecting, which led me to start thinking about the history of psalms. This led me to reading about John Newton who wrote Amazing Grace. I came to learn that Amazing Grace is frankly the least interesting part about his life and I set out to write a large scale work about it. A lot of references to Sufism bled into it and it ultimately represented something less than a musical biography and something more like my own religious beliefs blending with a historical survey. This was primarily inspired by Rehearsing My Choir.